Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Stopping the Bleeding

(Reprinted from the issue of October 14, 2004)

Even Bush partisans were embarrassed by the president’s poor performance in his first debate with John Kerry. (This is being written before their second debate.) Kerry presented a poised and commanding demeanor, speaking in nicely rolling sentences that didn’t maunder on after making their point. Bush looked tense, ran out of things to say, and largely repeated himself.

Kerry was at his best — pretty smooth, but not great — and Bush was at his worst. It was the wrong time for an off-night — just when the president was building a big lead in the stretch. But Bush isn’t used to handling disagreement and having to justify his actions; the presidency has shielded him from everyone but yes-men and enthusiastic crowds. He hasn’t even held many press conferences.

Even Bush admits he’s not a polished extemporaneous speaker. In fact, he’s naturally a laconic man who speaks in short sentences, not paragraphs. He’s used to saying his piece and leaving it at that. This isn’t a fault in itself, but the debate format demands a bit more loquacity than he can easily manage. So he had to fill in his allotted time with pauses, hesitations, and self-repetitions, made worse by his evident discomfort.

Bush didn’t have to win. He merely had to hold his own, and he couldn’t even do that. He barely maintained his own dignity. He did score an important point when he wondered how Kerry expects to enlist allies to finish the job in Iraq after calling the war futile, but he didn’t follow through with the force this deserved, and it fell rather flat. He could have turned Kerry’s own famous words against him: “How are you going to ask our allies’ young men to be the last to die for a war you’ve said is a mistake?”

Kerry, I thought, was a little too smooth for his own good. He too made strong points he should have amplified: First, that it was Osama bin Laden, not Saddam Hussein, who attacked this country. “Of course I know Osama bin Laden attacked us,” Bush replied lamely. “I know that.” But he didn’t explain why, in that case, he’d directed his efforts against Saddam, and Kerry let him change the subject. Second, that Bush’s own father had decided against trying to occupy Iraq in 1991 for very good reasons: There was no exit strategy, and the population was bitterly hostile. Again Kerry let Bush change the subject. If Bush repeated himself too much, Kerry may have repeated himself too little.
 
“Not Very Distinguished”

In any case, most people saw the debate as a clear victory for Kerry. Polls showed him pulling even with Bush, if not slightly ahead. It was a horserace again, with Kerry enjoying momentum.

This created intense interest in the debate between their running mates, even though there is little enthusiasm for either Vice President Dick Cheney or Sen. John Edwards.

Cheney is a multimillionaire with the solid presence of a smart but rather pedantic professor; in fact, he spoke of Edwards’s Senate record as “not very distinguished” as if he were handing out grades, while rebuking him for truancy.

This was effective, but not the memorable putdown that delights the audience that tunes in hoping for a good dogfight. There were no lines that will resound through posterity like “There you go again” and “You’re no Jack Kennedy.” And Edwards, the trial lawyer, is not one to sit there looking stunned by a scolding. He was surprisingly aggressive.

Edwards is a multimillionaire too, but he talks like a barefoot boy who has a few million secretly stashed away in the barn. His manner is earthy, even rustic; where Cheney is abstract, Edwards has the trial lawyer’s fondness for the personal anecdote. He came in with a sudden present from Paul Bremer, the former U.S. regent in Iraq, who had just made the indiscreet admission that the administration had been quite unprepared for the occupation. Again and again Edwards whacked Cheney with this and other bad news from Iraq; and unlike Kerry, he didn’t let up on his strong points. The administration had been wrong about the enemy, and has also misled the country.

The evidence was on Edwards’s side, but Cheney didn’t concede an inch. He insisted that the war is going well, pointing out that Afghan women are now voting and girls are going to school and accusing Kerry and Edwards of “demeaning our brave allies,” and the like. The vague phrase “significant progress” filled a good deal of his airtime. He didn’t really answer most of Edwards’s points, but his bluster at least avoided the awkwardness that had made Bush look so bad.

If Cheney exaggerated U.S. progress in Iraq, Edwards sounded almost laughable insisting that he and Kerry have been “consistent” on Iraq. He left you wondering how so many people have somehow gotten the wrong impression. Here he left himself open to powerful counterpunches from Cheney, who mocked the word “consistent.” Cheney also developed the argument Bush had muffed, that Kerry has already made it impossible for himself, if elected, to rally allies to support the occupation.

To Edwards’s charges that the Bush administration isn’t spending enough on domestic programs, Cheney offered this defense: We are too! So Cheney, the capitalist, allowed the debate to proceed on socialist premises, boasting how much the administration has done for education, minorities, employment, et cetera. As Cheney said, he and Edwards have more areas of agreement than disagreement. How true!

Edwards managed a sly mention of Cheney’s lesbian daughter, oleaginously praising Cheney and his wife for loving her so very very much. It was a feline touch, a bit like praising Kerry for being so decent to his first wife; but Cheney could only reply by thanking him for his “kind words.” (He might as well have thanked him for mentioning Halliburton.)

The ensuing discussion of same-sex unions was the most tangled moment of the evening. Edwards finally allowed that he and Kerry believe marriage is something between a man and a woman, but not before expressing their deep concern for the differently oriented and their outrage at the idea of using the Constitution to divide Americans. At that point it may have sunk in with many voters that they were watching a first-class phony.

It was hard to say who got the better of the debate; both men showed an impressive command of their facts and, in theatrical terms, performed well. Both sides, of course, claimed victory, as always; polls showed public reaction pretty evenly divided.

But, five days after Bush’s near-disaster, Cheney accomplished one thing: For the moment, he stopped the bleeding.


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Joseph Sobran